Star Carrier 6: Deep Time (25 page)

“Nice shot, Meg!” Caswell yelled.

It
had
been a good shot, Dahlquist thought, a direct hit from eight kilometers with high deflection and without the benefit of a target lock or smart ordnance. Dahlquist wondered how Connor was holding up, knowing her lover was lost outside. . . .

“Form up, Demons,” the squadron’s CO called. “Tuck it in! Tuck it in!” Mackey had a thing about messy formations. Not that nicely ordered ranks were going to help in
here
.

But ten kilometers ahead, he could see their goal: the blunt shield-cap noses of two human starships, tucked away among the gantries and derricks of something that might be a shipyard. They were aglow in deep infrared light, and appeared to be nestled close to a pair of the emnigmatic Glothr time-benders.

The human ships—his
brother’s
ship—just ahead.

“Objectives in sight!” he called to the others. “
Pax
and
Concord
, bearing zero-zero-zero at eight kilometers!”

“Let’s get in there, people,” Mackey said. “The Marines need some cover! Keep it tight, people. . . .”

Place of Cold Dreaming

Invictus Ring

1713 hours, TFT

“Seven-one-cee-eight! The enemy is entering the ring in force!”

“I see it. Try to hold them. We are deploying more of the time-twisters.”

“There may be too many for—”

The transmission cut off with startling abruptness.

Numbers and technology, Seven-one-cee-eight thought, should have been sufficient to pin, overwhelm, and destroy this surprisingly dogged enemy, but it appeared that they possessed a tactical advantage that might well result in the Kin’s defeat. They were
fast
, their nervous systems functioning several times more quickly and more efficiently than those of the Kin, which meant that their reaction times were faster, their aim surer, their battlefield responses much quicker. The Kin’s robotic servants had been developed to counter the reaction time superiority of many other species within the Sh’daar associative, allowing freer and more accurate communication with faster minds, but even minor differences in reaction times were still serious enough to create a major disadvantage in combat, both ship-to-ship and among troops on the ground or in space.

It connected with one of the other Kin. “Dee-one-three-jay! Bring your twisters forward.”

“That will mean releasing the human ships.”

“If we do not, we will lose the human ships in any case. I want you to attempt to stop the attack through the breach.”

“I am doubtful, Seven-one-cee-eight. There are too many of them.”

“I doubt as well, Dee-one-three-jay. But it is the only chance we have.”

“We swarm together.”

We swarm together
. The phrase, a statement of agreement and compliance, was the equivalent of a human’s “yes, sir” or “aye, aye.” When the Kin were in their juvenile phase, they swarmed their world’s ammonia-water seas in the hundreds of billions, minute, translucent polyps possessing only the rudiments of consciousness or sentience. By banding together in vast, cloudy masses aglow with bioluminescence, they defended themselves against the predators of Invictus’s vast and abyssal deeps.

The phrase was also a cultural reminder that no member of the Kin was above another, save as an accident of circumstance; the battle against the human fleet was a communal effort.

And as such, Seven-one-cee-eight was beginning to believe, they may have revealed a critical weakness in the Kin’s defenses. Humans, it had learned during its brief stay on Earth, were often divided and weak, but they could come together under common leadership in a way that was surprisingly strong. Their leaders were
trained
as leaders, and did not relinquish their role.

Surely, though, that limited the experience of any given leader? In its career, Seven-one-cee-eight had been ship master and crewman, swarm leader and drone. It knew all sides of the social equation, and could sense the thrill of the entire electrical current.

It wondered if that would be enough to defeat these humans, these monsters from the abyss of time and space. . . .

VMFA-77, “Devil Dogs”

4
th
Regimental Assault Group

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1714 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Roger Mayhew used his mental link with his AI to bring his Velociraptor around onto a new heading, angling toward the far end of the vast, dark cavern of the ring interior. Blackness enveloped him, then gave way to the blue and green glows of cool infrared. His fighter gave a shudder as he cut acceleration, and he wondered if the old Velociraptor was up to this.

The Marines had an old and venerable tradition of making do with older equipment—not entirely true in the case of the MAPP-2 units, but definitely for Marine space-air. VMFA-77 had received the SG-101s the year before, but the Marine Corps’ budget hadn’t yet allowed for those strike fighters to be replaced by the much newer and more modern Starblades.

In fact, Velociraptors weren’t
that
old. They’d only come on-line a couple of years ago, but indisputably, the ’Blades were newer, faster, and more powerful, and military technology was galloping ahead into an alien future faster than any human could keep up.

It would be damned nice, Mayhew thought, if the Corps could just once in a while deploy with truly frontline and first-rate gear, something that wouldn’t be obsolete a few months later. Veloci
crappers
. That was the nickname for the SG-101s within the Marine strike squadrons that flew them.

He wondered what would be replacing Starblades . . . and how much longer they would remain cutting edge.

“Green One,” he called, “Green Seven. I’ve got a lock on one of the Guard ships. The
Pax
, I think.”

“Copy that, Seven,” Captain Larson, the Devil Dogs’ skipper, replied. “Move in as close as you can.”

“Roj.” He cut his forward velocity to nearly nothing, switched off his gravitic drive, and let the weak local gravity drag him deeper into the black, vertical canyon at a few meters per second. The
Pax
was nestled in among a forest of gantries and structural supports, almost inaccessible. She didn’t appear damaged at all, but there was no sign of life, no wink of navigation strobes, no indication of onboard power, no open communications channels.

“There’s the other one over there,” Lieutenant Kathryn Bixby, Green Five, said. “Wait . . . what’s that moving next to the
Pax
?”

Mayhew saw the movement in the same moment: a silver cylinder, pointed at both ends and tucked away in the gantries and derricks directly alongside the
Pax
.

“Stay clear of that thing!” Mayhew warned. “It’s a Glothr time-bender!”

“There’s another one!” Lieutenant Ramirez called. “Next to the
Concord
!”

“I think,” Mayhew said, “that they’re bringing out the big guns.”

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus surface, T+12 MY

1715 hours, TFT

Gregory didn’t remember much of his passage through to the Invictan surface. His AI had taken over what remained of his fighter’s maneuvering systems, but there wasn’t enough power left over to let him see what was going on. Encased in blackness, he’d crouched within the embrace of his Starblade’s cockpit, straining to breathe against the crushing pressure of deceleration. The fighter’s gravitic drive boosted the ship and its pilot in free fall, permitting accelerations of tens of thousands of gravities, but the small impellers used as an auxiliary drive did not. As the Starblade dropped toward Invictus, the straining impellers applied more and more thrust, reaching ten Gs and bringing Gregory to the ragged edge of unconsciousness.

The impellers failed, and for a stomach-wrenching moment, Gregory was again in free fall, dropping through emptiness.

The Starblade stuck the surface at an oblique angle, guided by the AI to come in almost parallel to the surface. He felt the shock of impact . . . another moment of free fall . . . another jolt . . . and then he was tumbling over and over, slamming against one side of the pilot capsule and then the other until at long, long last, he came to a shuddering halt.

He was down.

“AI!” he called. “Can you get me a visual feed?”

There was no response, and he remained in blackness. He wondered if the Starblade, all of its systems, was completely dead.

He still had his in-head icons up and running, however. He triggered the icon that would begin the reboot process, hoping to bring his fighter’s AI back to life.

Without it, he was dead.

1/4 Marines

4
th
Regimental Assault Group, 1
st
MARDIV

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1717 hours, TFT

It had been a long time, Major Smith decided, since the Marines had taken part in an old-fashioned over-the-top
charge
. Black MAPP units were flowing down the internal walls of the crater in a cloud, accelerating into the depths, as Glothr fire snapped and flared from farther down inside the depths. Ahead, Smith could see the Marine fighters tangling with a couple of Glothr ships. . . .

No—not just ships! Those two shapes were the alien time-warping units, like the one that had originally immobilized the
Concord
on board the first Glothr ship they’d encountered back at Sol. Whether it was an independent warship or a piece of machinery—a weapon mounted here inside the ring—was unknown. What
was
known was that the things were
extremely
dangerous. . . .

“Open up on those two big targets,” Smith ordered his Marines. “Don’t let them deploy!”

Particle beams and laser fire snapped across the dwindling last few kilometers. The Marines were sharply limited in the weapons they could use in these close confines. Nuke shipkillers would destroy their surroundings as well as the targets, might damage the two imprisoned High Guard vessels as well—and probably kill any Marines in proximity.

Time, Smith noticed, seemed to be slowing to a crawl, and he wondered if the effect was due to the alien temporal weapons or if it was simply a subjective effect of intense and deadly combat.

Chapter Twenty-two

7 August, 2425

USNS/HGF
Concord

Invictis Ring, T+12 MY

1718 hours, TFT

From Terrance Dahlquist’s perspective,
Concord
had been captured barely an instant ago. The High Guard ship had been accelerating out from Invictus, pushing
c
hard on her way back to rejoin the task force at the TRGA cylinder, when a Glothr time-bending ship had come up through the starbow of weirdly twisted space ahead of the ship—
ahead
, since one of the illusions of near-
c
travel made objects coming from behind appear to be ahead and to one side. Dahlquist had had just enough time to scream a warning through the ship’s intercom: “
Brace for collision!
”

And then . . . nothing.

He took a deep breath. He’d been panting with the exertion, the stress, the raw fear . . . and now
Concord
was someplace else entirely. His data feeds showed that she was no longer accelerating, no longer moving close to the speed of light, that the ship, in fact, was now
inside
some sort of immense hanger or orbital facility.

The inrush of new data was staggering, a torrent, a waterfall of information about the ship and surrounding space. Dahlquist scanned the ship’s surroundings, startled to see that
Concord
now appeared to be motionless in a space dock of some sort, surrounded by scaffolding and the tiny, hovering shapes of Glothr robots. A flash dazzled his in-head eye, and he realized that wherever they were, they were in the eye of a fiercely raging battle. A Glothr ship, sleek and sharply pointed on both ends, was sliding clear of the dock and away from the
Concord
. That, he decided, was why the passage of time had resumed for the captured ship; the mechanisms that had slowed time for the
Concord
and the
Pax
were now moving away, and taking their time-slowing fields with them.

In the distance, human fighters, both Starblades and Velociraptors, were approaching, together with a large number of troops in MAPP-2 assault pods. The battle was savage and unrelenting: Dahlquist watched as Marines were picked off; fighters were picked off; torrents of particle-beam and laser fire were directed against the alien time benders.

Dahlquist had no way of knowing how much time had passed since
Concord
had been captured, since every computer, AI, and timekeeping device on board the ship had been frozen in time with the ship itself. It could be hours later . . . or centuries. . . .

No, not centuries. Fighter designs changed so rapidly that if centuries had passed since
Concord
’s capture, the fighters out there would be unrecognizable. The Marines on board the
Marne
, he remembered, still used ’Raptors. The chances were excellent that those fighters out there were part of
America
’s TF-1.

Hell, one of those Starblades might well be Fred’s.

Hard on the heels of that revelation came another.
They’d come for them!
Specifically, Admiral Gray had brought the whole task force into . . . whatever this alien place was to find the
Concord
and
Pax
and rescue them.

And that single fact put a different spin on things for Dahlquist.

Sure, human warriors operated under a sacred ethos, one that said that you never left your own behind . . . but sometimes—more often than not, perhaps—there was simply no way to honor that promise.

Which made it damned special when your own
did
come back for you.

Gregory

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus surface, T+12 MY

1725 hours, TFT

Gregory felt the hull of his crippled Starblade give a shudder. It was cooling fast, and he didn’t have much time left.

He’d finally been able to reboot his AI, and then get an exterior view, the image revealed on an in-head window. Not that it helped much. The landscape outside was black and frigid, with rocks made of water-ice and the galaxy hanging above one horizon, cold, beautiful, and remote. The temperature, according to his feed, was just twenty degrees Kelvin. The heat remaining in his Starblade was leaching out into the ice at a horrific rate; his life support system was struggling to keep up, but it wouldn’t be long, Gregory knew, before the system would die.

And then so would he.

His Starblade was sending out an automated distress signal, but there was very little power behind it. He doubted that any SAR vehicles off the
America
would be able to pick it up. His communications were out as well. Again, no power.

Somewhere, he thought, somewhere far below him—a hundred kilometers or more if the theories he’d heard about Invictus were correct—there was warmth enough to keep a vast ocean liquid. There, life had evolved, and intelligence, and an advanced, star-faring civilization. The Glothr eventually had escaped the icy prison of their world and built the incredible ring system overhead, and traveled now between the stars and across time itself.

He wondered if there was any way of attracting the notice of Glothr living in the world ocean underneath the ice. Probably not. His AI didn’t seem to have any ideas.

At the current rate of heat loss from his Starblade, he would start to feel the cold in an hour or two, would be frozen into a solid block of ice in four. He was wearing a pressure suit, but if he opened the Starblade’s nanomatrix hull and stepped out into that frigid hell, it wouldn’t keep him alive more than a couple of minutes.

Don Gregory quietly contemplated the certainty of death, thought about Meg, and prepared to die.

Connor

VFA-96, The Black Demons

Invictus surface, T+12 MY

1725 hours, TFT

Lieutenant Megan Connor pulled her fighter up, trying to avoid the time-slow field somehow being broadcast from the sleek Glothr ship ahead. Her ship jolted . . . then slowed—slowed
a lot
—and she realized that she’d been caught in the alien temporal field.

“Watch out!” she called over the squadron channel. “That time-twister shit is active!” She’d thought it was switched off, but apparently they’d turned it on again. Or, rather, it appeared that they could project that field several hundred meters in one direction or another.
Damn
 . . .

“Copy, Demon Three,” Mackey replied. “Get your ass out of there!”

“Trying . . .”

Tears had gathered on her face and she’d not been able to wipe them away, not without opening her helmet . . . but now she felt the pull of gravity against her as the ship dragged through the temporal field and she shook her head, hard, trying to dislodge the gleaming droplets of liquid. She detested the tears, the weakness . . . but was still having trouble getting past the fact that Don was
gone
.

That, of course, was the biggest single problem with forming emotional attachments to other pilots, or to other shipmates in general, for that matter. It was one thing when you knew your loved one was back on Earth or a colony world, waiting for your return. It was quite something else when that loved one was flying off your wing, and was in just as much danger of being killed as you.

She and Don had discussed it, of course, but it had always seemed so fucking
theoretical
. They’d thought they’d come to grips with the possibility of losing one another, thought it was all right. Hell—it hadn’t even been all that serious.
Fuck buddies
, that was all they’d been. Friends with benefits, as the old joke had it. Recreational sex wasn’t supposed to get so damned serious.

But now his Starblade was lost, singed by a near hit and sent hurtling off into emptiness, and she knew that she’d been fooling herself.
America
’s SAR units would be deployed in a search, of course, but the chances of finding one small nanomatrix fighter out there in all that nothingness were somewhere between remote and nonexistent.

Assuming, of course, that he was even alive now. The odds of surviving as a fighter pilot in all-out ship-to-ship combat were not good to begin with. Worse, the SAR tugs wouldn’t be deployed until the battle was over and then only if the human fleet had won.

Connor screamed, a sonic burst of pent-up rage and frustration. If the battle had to end then, damn it,
she would end it
. She lined up with the alien time bender, now drifting slowly past her bow a hundred meters below, and loosed a stream of depleted-uranium KK projectiles from her ship’s high-speed Gatling.

“Take
that
, you fucking bastards!”

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1728 hours, TFT

“Admiral Gray? Truitt here.”

“Make it quick, Doctor. We’re a little busy up here.”

“I understand that. But I’ve been going through the data we picked up a month ago from Surat. There’s something here you should see.”

Gray very nearly dismissed Truitt with a sharp “tell me later.” The head of
America
’s xenosoph department was acerbic and difficult, a true genius with indifferent social skills and no patience at all for what he perceived as stupidity in others.

But he was undeniably brilliant, and if he’d just run into something he felt was important enough to disturb him during
combat
—it was a damned good idea for Gray to at the very least find out what it was.

“What have you got for us?”

“A complete bio-profile on the Glothr. Apparently, the Confederation xeno people at Surat were in the middle of doing a complete workup when the Glothr ship lifted off.”

“And?”

“Have a look.”

Data streamed down the link, translated from Hindi. There was a lot . . . including speculation on Glothr natural history, their evolution in an under-ice ocean, their transition from a marine species to dry land some millions of years ago—even the possibility that that evolution had been directed by another sapient species.

Those damned stargods again.

But that wasn’t what Truitt wanted him to notice. Gray’s eyes went to where the doctor had flagged the information about Glothr senses.

“While the Glothr possess organs sensitive to light, especially at shorter wavelengths and extending up into the ultraviolet, vision does not appear to be their primary sense. Instead, they appear to rely on an electro-sense similar in certain respects to the sense employed by sharks, rays, and other terrestrial marine species. Their primary means of determining the shape and content of their surroundings would seem to be the electro-sense. . . .”

“What’s your point, Dr. Truitt?”

“I should think that would be obvious, Admiral. The Glothr may be susceptible to an EMP.”

“Check that,” he told the ship’s AI. Returning to the open channel with Truitt, he asked, “Delivered how?”

“A large enough particle-beam weapon would do it.”

“We’ve been hammering them with pee-beeps and nukes all evening, and they don’t seem to mind it at all.”

“If you can get through their shielding, Admiral, get in
close
, you might find differently.”

Data was coming back from the AI now. “Let me check it out, Doc. I’ll talk to you later.”

There was something to what Truitt had suggested.

In fact,
America
’s AI had already come up with the same damned idea.

VFA-31, The Impactors

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1729 hours, TFT

For half an hour, St. Clair had fallen into the night.

His terror had grown through the course of those thirty minutes until he’d thought his fast-pounding heart would explode, and sweat poured down his face inside his pressure helmet, blinding him.

He’d been able to see through his in-head displays, though, and he’d stared into that ultimate night, unable to switch it off despite the hammering, nightmare fear.
Alone . . . alone in the night
 . . .

America
’s psych department had checked him out thoroughly, of course, immediately after his rescue. And in fact he’d not thought he’d needed to be checked out. When he’d been singed in the tangle with the Turusch, he’d been knocked unconscious, and he’d not come around until he’d been back on board
America
, in the star carrier’s sick bay. That had been . . . what? Just fourteen hours ago.

But something had happened, because he was feeling inexpressible terror now as, for the second time in twenty-four hours, his Starblade fell through emptiness into the intergalactic Void.

He checked to make sure his crippled fighter was broadcasting an emergency signal. He’d been picked up by a SAR tug once; maybe they could do it again. If they didn’t, he would die a hideously cold and lonely death, out here thousands of light years away from the nearest star.

His vector, he noticed, was taking him past the black disk of Invictus. Maybe
they
would pick him up. . . .

Something brushed his mind.

“Wait,” he said aloud. “Wait . . . what was that?”

His AI reached out, struggling to collect and amplify an impossibly weak signal. There! It wasn’t much, but it sounded like another distress signal, just a whisper, coming from the surface of Invictus.

Well, major fighter battles always resulted in streakers. Evidently, one had made it safely down to the surface of the rogue world. There wasn’t a lot that St. Clair could do about it right at the moment.

USNA Star Carrier
America

Invictus Space, T+12 MY

1730 hours, TFT

On Gray’s in-head display, he could see a graphic schematic of the battle inside the ring structure. There’d been a report from one of the Black Demon pilots that the Glothr time benders were using their temporal weapon again. He’d already given orders to the ships already inside the ring structure to concentrate their fire on those two vessels, to try to put them out of the fight.